In the Zubuntu 1.0-RC1 release I included Audacious as a lightweight media player. Worked as a charm, at least for me. Now, working on the Zubuntu 2.0-RC1 release, I tried the Audacious v1.5.1 player from the Ubuntu Jaunty repository. No luck, the player wouldn't even start, it just segfaulted.

Googling here and there I found Eina, downloaded the source and compiled the player natively. Eina indeed is a nice, simple but complete media player, using Gtk+-2.0 only and GStreamer for media playback it fitted the lightweight profile. But after playing back some random MP3 files it came apparent that it couldn't play the tracks without hickups on my Zaurus. Whatever the root cause of the hickups was I still don't know, but the effect was that I once more Googled for Audacious and the cause of it segfaulting on startup.

To my surprise, the author of Audacious has just released a brand new version (v2.0.1) a couple of days back. Perfect timing, so I downloaded the source and started to compile it once again natively. The building started about 5 hours ago now, and it is still building the list of plugins. I had to restart the build once because of an error in the SID plugin, so I disabled that one. Maybe next time I need to check first whether cross-compilation is a better option. I wouldn't dare to stop it now!

To be continued, hopefully the result will be worthwhile...

Update: Not bad at all. Building finally finished, and the player works. Guess what. I think this will be the media player for the next oncoming Zubuntu release

Update: I'm glad to say this was really worth the effort. The new Audacious 2.0.1 player plays the tracks I've thrown at it without any interruptions. Bitrates varied up to 256Kb/s. And it's even light enough to do other stuff as well without any problems. Superb!

Last Saturday The Band Of Horses played in Paradiso in Amsterdam. I like their music, a beautiful mixture of sound, with the astonishing high pitch voice of Ben Bridwell. We went with the four of us. Too bad I was the only one digging their music I guess, since the others all left early. Maybe it was because of the wall of sound, maybe it was their lack of taste. Doesn't matter, I had a great time

What do you do when you've been ill for a couple of days, you feel a whole lot better now, but far too weak to go back to work. Well in my case, I took my G-400 and played... well, at least I tried, since I never took the time to learn a single note after buying it. Shame on me, but hey, the time will come, promise. Kum-ba-jaaaah!

I googled a bit, searching for opinions on this specific model. To my astonishment, I read in a review here that the reviewer

had a bit of trouble with the g-string coming out of tune recently

I was flabbergasted, really. Hellˇˇˇˇˇ, what's the big deal here, every time I tried (that was after finding out where the g-string was) it definitely sounded out of tune!!